All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

by Janelle Brown

  “She fired her,” Lizzie says. She chooses not to mention the fact that Guadalupe had been blamed for the vanishing booze that she herself had, in fact, been stealing from the liquor cabinet. Oops.

  Lizzie picks up the Ladies’ Home Journal article and skims the first paragraph: “When Jenny’s husband fled for the Bahamas with his 23-year-old secretary, emptying their bank account and even taking their pet Chihuahua, Jenny thought things couldn’t get any worse. Then she showed up in divorce court and discovered that her husband—an investment banker—was suing her—an unemployed housewife—for $8,000 a month in alimony. Jenny tried committing suicide, slitting her wrists in a bathtub, before she finally got smart and…”

  Lizzie looks up. “Do you think Mom is going to commit suicide?”

  Margaret wrinkles her nose. “I doubt it. It would make a mess of the white rugs. Unless she chose something neat, like a bottle of sleeping pills.”

  Lizzie, alarmed, tries to recall the insides of her mother’s medicine cabinet. “Could Vicodin be a sleeping pill? Mom had some of that.”

  “Why does Mom have Vicodin?”

  “She hurt herself playing tennis in the spring. She walked around with her arm all bandaged up for two weeks.”

  “Right,” says Margaret. “Well, don’t worry, Vicodin is harmless. You can’t kill yourself with it. Not really.”

  “Oh,” says Lizzie, but she’s not convinced.

  Margaret notices the look on her face and reaches over to rub Lizzie’s back. “Hey, I was only joking, Lizzie. Mom would never kill herself. She’s just not the suicidal type. Besides, she’s too much of a control freak to let us run amok in her house without her around to make sure we don’t make a mess of things. Right?”

  Lizzie puts down the papers. “Why are you reading Ladies’ Home Journal?”

  “I saw it at the supermarket, thought it sounded relevant.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Research. For Mom.”

  “They’re getting divorced, right?” Lizzie asks reluctantly.

  Margaret nods and flips to a new page, her eyes still focused on the tiny text. “If Dad has his way.”

  “Will he?” Lizzie’s eyes are stinging, and she realizes that she’s holding back tears. For a moment she hangs on to the hope that Margaret will say that her father won’t, in fact, have his way; that their mom will convince him that he was wrong and he’ll leave Beverly and come home and everything will return to normal.

  “Yes,” she says, dropping the sheaf of papers to her lap. “In all probability.”

  Lizzie blinks twice and frowns. “Oh,” she says. “So are you going to help Mom?”

  “Yes,” Margaret says, in a loud, firm voice, and Lizzie is warmed momentarily by the assertion. Margaret always seems to have it together; if there is something good to be redeemed from the situation, Margaret will find it. She closes her eyes and feels safe in her sister’s presence; if Margaret were home all the time, she thinks, it would be like having a best friend living right in the house with her. “I think I’m going to go make myself a sundae,” Lizzie announces. “Do you want one?”

  Margaret shakes her head and stacks the papers on the table. She aligns them with three quick raps. “Not hungry. Thanks, though.”

  Lizzie pauses at the doorway. “Margaret? How old were you when you lost your virginity?”

  Margaret raises an eyebrow. “Wait, Lizzie. Wait until you’re much, much older.”

  Lizzie feels her face flush and is frightened that her sister might be able to see right through her pink cheeks to the ugly truth inside. She’s just a little annoyed that Margaret always seems to think that she’s too young to discuss anything of importance. “C’mon, Margaret. I’m not, like, a child.”

  “You’re only fourteen.”

  “Fifteen in October!” She grips the doorway.

  “Seriously. Wait. For three reasons. A: Men suck, and all you have to do is look at what’s going on with Mom and Dad to see this in action. B: Teenage boys, especially, suck. C: Teenage boys suck especially in bed. You won’t enjoy it; they don’t know the clitoris from the clavicle.” She gives Lizzie a Very Serious look, the one with accordion eyebrows and flared nostrils that says Margaret Means Business. “More importantly, though, Lizzie, is that it’s risky, both physically and emotionally. As long as you can postpone the kind of grief that comes with sex, you should. I know life sometimes seems hard now, but it gets even harder later, once you start factoring love and sex into the equation. If you really want to explore sex, let’s talk about vibrators.”

  Lizzie, taking this in, feels sick. It’s too late, she thinks, as she sees this miserable future spreading out before her. Surely, she thinks, Margaret must have some hope for her? “But it’s not like that with Bart, right?”

  Margaret barks a small little laugh and wrinkles her nose. “No. Bart is an angel.”

  Lizzie smiles bravely. “I’m sure he is,” she says. “You’re so lucky.”

  The kitchen is sparkling and smells like bleach. Janice has left a casserole on the countertop that’s labeled with a stickie note: “Dinner. 350 degrees for 30 minutes.” Lizzie peels back the aluminum foil and probes it with her finger, breaking through a filo dough crust to a layer of spinach: spanakopita. Lizzie hates spinach. Just once, she wishes her mother would make something like mac-n-cheese from a box. Maybe she can convince Margaret to go out to dinner.

  She finds the freezer well stocked with ice cream and mango sorbet—the latter probably intended for her, but she makes herself a mocha toffee almond fudge sundae anyway, sneaking a few big bites before she goes back to the other room so that Margaret won’t see what a pig she’s being.

  The ice cream is hard and icy, and Lizzie eats it slowly, putting a spoonful at a time in her mouth and letting it melt on her tongue as long as she can bear it, before her teeth freeze and she has to swallow. Margaret watches her and sighs; a long, hot puff of air. “I really need a cigarette,” Margaret says, but she doesn’t move from the couch. Lizzie looks at the rose arrangement on the sideboard, the neatly stacked pile of coffee-table books—Golf Courses of the World, Mediterranean Castles, and The Gardens of Manet—and her mother’s weird French magazines that no one reads and the collection of antique boxes on the display shelves. She thinks, again, of the writing on the wall in the boys’ locker room—of her whole secret life exposed for everyone in school to see, of all the boys who pretended to like her when it turned out they didn’t care at all, of the boys who scribbled their names on the wall even though she never touched them, the liars. (Mark! Mark Weatherlove! What a creep!) She wants to sweep everything to the floor, to crunch the porcelain under her heels, tear the books in half, make a mess of the house. She has the crawling sensation that she is being watched and that there is some impending doom before her. She puts the sundae down and sinks back into the beige velvet cushions, letting the voluminous couch cocoon her. Maybe she’ll slip into the cracks between the cushions and disappear forever.

  Out in the front yard, the gravel crunches and Lizzie hears the whir of an engine idling to a stop. A car has pulled into the driveway. Margaret looks at Lizzie, looks at the living room window, and jumps up to pull the curtains aside.

  “Who is that?” Margaret asks, as she peers out.

  Lizzie follows her and peers out too. A woman in a fuchsia drop-waist cocktail dress is climbing out of the driver’s seat of a Mercedes station wagon, carefully placing one black heel before the other as she navigates the gravel of the driveway. She carries a woven basket filled with silver tissue paper in one hand and uses the other to tug her panty hose into place in the back. She looks up at the house, glances down at her watch, and then begins to walk resolutely toward the front door.

  “That’s Barbara Bint,” says Lizzie. “She’s a friend of Mom’s, from the club.”

  “Why is she here?” Margaret asks.

  Lizzie shrugs. “No idea.”

  The sisters stand transfixed in the window
, watching Barbara pick her way through the gravel and then vanish out of their view. The doorbell rings.

  Margaret heads for the front door. Lizzie stays frozen at the living room window, watching the evening light sparkle in the gravel, catching on bits of mica trapped in the rocks. She can hear the murmur of Margaret talking to Barbara Bint in the foyer. She wills time to stop, so that she is forever standing in this window, watching the setting sun, staving off whatever danger or embarrassment lies behind the closed doors of this reassuringly beige room.

  Mrs. Bint bursts into the living room just as Lizzie turns around.

  “Am I the first person here? I’m always the first person,” Barbara Bint wails. “Such a terrible habit I have, but don’t you think that promptness has just gone the way of etiquette and good manners these days? I really think it should be revived. If an invitation says seven o’clock, then I say, be there at seven o’clock. I can’t stand it when I throw a party myself and everyone is late and the canapés get dried out in the oven while you wait! Give this to your mother, Lizzie? Home-baked carrot muffins!” She flourishes the basket, sweeps over to Lizzie, and leans in to kiss her on the cheek. She smells like baby powder and jasmine, and up close, Lizzie can see the droplets of dried hairspray that shellac her hair into perfectly symmetrical wings.

  Mrs. Bint stands back, holding Lizzie at arm’s length with one hand. “Let me look at you. It’s been so long since I’ve seen you, Lizzie, and I can really see what your mother was saying about your weight loss. You look marvelous! Though I don’t understand why kids these days don’t feel the need to dress up. My own Zeke never wants to wear shoes either, and his feet get so filthy!” Lizzie looks down at her bare feet, her cutoffs and tank top—with dripping brown stains from her afternoon milkshake and evening sundae down the front—and blushes.

  Mrs. Bint continues: “And it looks like I’m so early that your mother isn’t even dressed yet? Well, that will give us some time to catch up while she gets ready. Tell me, Lizzie, how are you? How’s school? I hear you’re quite the swimmer.”

  As she babbles, Lizzie looks around wildly for Margaret and sees her standing in the doorway. Margaret mouths something incomprehensible at Lizzie, her lips churning around exaggerated silent vowels. Lizzie, alarmed, shakes her head in incomprehension. Margaret points dramatically at the ceiling and then circles a finger beside her head, seemingly suggesting that someone—herself? Barbara Bint?—has gone cuckoo.

  “I’m good,” Lizzie begins, as through the window she sees another car arrive in the driveway. The doorbell rings once more. Margaret vanishes again.

  “Where’s the caterer?” Still holding the basket out, Mrs. Bint looks around, as if a waiter might pop up from behind the couch or erupt out of the sideboard. “I’d love something to drink. Some sparkling water, maybe. With lime. Is there a bar somewhere?”

  “I’ll get you some,” Lizzie says, seizing the opportunity to escape. She thumps out of the living room, passing Margaret, who is standing in the foyer taking coats from Martha and Steven Grouper, parents of her classmate Max. Max, the third person she slept with. On April 17, according to the bathroom scorecard. Oh, God, she thinks. They are the last people she feels capable of facing right now. She dodges them with a quick “hello” over her shoulder and trips into the kitchen.

  Lizzie grabs a plastic tumbler from the kitchen cabinet, stops, and puts it back. Her mother would be appalled if she served guests with the cheap glasses. Instead, she climbs up onto the kitchen counter so that she can reach the top shelf, where the wedding crystal is kept. She grabs as many glasses as she can balance in one arm and drops back down to the ground. A glass tumbles from the crook of her elbow and explodes on the tile floor, leaving a million shards of crystal glittering on the floor.

  Margaret runs into the kitchen, banging through the swinging door so quickly that it slams against the wall. She has sweat beading up on her forehead.

  “What’s going on?” Lizzie asks, but she already knows. She remembers her mother clipping recipes from Gourmet magazine in preparation, and the pile of invitations that Lizzie mailed for her mother a month ago, just a week before her father vanished with Beverly Weatherlove.

  “Mom forgot about her cocktail party,” Margaret says.

  “She did!” Lizzie finds this hard to fathom. It’s like Santa forgetting about Christmas. Like her math teacher Mr. Nimroy forgetting the algebra final. It explodes the natural laws of science. “What do we do?”

  “Run upstairs and get her out of bed. Quick, before these people eat us alive. I’ll man the door.”

  “But Barbara Bint wants some sparkling water.”

  “I’ll get it,” Margaret says. “Do we have anything to feed them? Some cheese and crackers? Any mini-quiches in the freezer?”

  “There’s spanakopita that Mom made. I could make some spaghetti.”

  Margaret makes a face. “Don’t think that will fly. I’m sure Mom has something she can whip together. Go get her!”

  “But she said not to disturb her, right?”

  “I’m serious. Go!” whispers Margaret, already slamming mineral water and ice into a glass. “Don’t leave me alone for long.”

  Lizzie takes the stairs two at a time, catching sight of herself in the full-length gilt mirror that stands at the top of the landing. She is red-faced and makeup-free—she didn’t put on any after getting out of the pool—and strings dangle from where she chopped the bottom off her cutoffs.

  The door to her mother’s room is closed, and Lizzie stands outside it for a minute, pressing her ear to its surface. Is her mother still napping, with all this noise? All she can hear through the door is the air echoing through her own eardrum. Lizzie taps on the wood with a knuckle and presses her ear to the door again. Nothing. She knocks louder. Still nothing.

  She screws up her courage and opens the door, just a hair so that she can peek in. It takes her a minute to adjust to the dark of the room and see her mother lying on her side on the bed, wrapped in a silk bathrobe, her back to the door.

  “Mom?” Lizzie asks. “You awake?”

  Janice doesn’t move. Lizzie pushes the door all the way open and enters, then clicks the door gently closed behind her. The thick carpet muffles the sound of the party downstairs, so that only an occasional distant high-pitched squeal wafts up from the living room. Lizzie tiptoes over to the bed, lifts a pile of pillows out of the way, and sits down on the edge beside her mother. Janice’s eyes are open. She stares vacantly at the silk curtains that are pulled closed against the evening sunset.

  “Lizzie,” she says, in a croak so shallow that Lizzie has to lean in to understand her. “Is someone here?”

  “Yeah,” Lizzie begins. “It’s. Well.”

  “Is it James?” Janice pushes herself up on an elbow. “Has James come yet?”

  Lizzie is taken aback. “James?”

  “The pool boy,” says Janice.

  “No,” says Lizzie. “But Mrs. Bint is here.”

  “Oh, no,” says Janice, and rolls heavily onto her back. She presses a palm to her forehead and leaves it there, her eyes closed. “What is she doing here? Make her go away. Tell her I can’t make it to her church meeting this week.”

  “She’s here for a cocktail party,” Lizzie says. “So are the Groupers. And I think some other people. Were you supposed to have a party?”

  Janice sits up quickly and exhales a sharp breath. “Oh!” she whispers. “I totally forgot. How could I forget?”

  “Do you want me to run you a bath or something?”

  Janice presses her index fingers into the corners of her eyes, as if she’s trying to pin them closed. There is a long silence. “No,” she says. “I can’t do it. Not right now.”

  “Can’t do it?” Lizzie is alarmed; this is the first time she has ever heard her mother say that she can’t do something.

  “I can’t go down there,” says Janice, shaking her head. She lies back down and closes her eyes. “Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid.
Your mother is an imbecile, Lizzie.”

  “No, you’re not, Mom,” Lizzie says, about to totally freak out. What is going on? “I forget stuff all the time. I forgot to take out the garbage just the other day, remember?”

  But Janice is shaking her head back and forth against the pillow and, to Lizzie’s alarm, her eyes are filling up with tears. “I can’t face them,” she says. “I’m a wreck.”

  And Lizzie has to agree that her mother does not, in fact, look her best. She has crescents of old mascara under her eyes, and her hair is dark with oil around her hairline. A tiny red sprinkling of rash has materialized under her nose, and the skin around her eye sockets looks bruised. The last time she saw her mother look this bad was when she got a nasty case of salmonella from a bad batch of oysters a few years back and almost died. She spent a week in bed with a 103 degree fever, unable to eat anything but Gatorade and Wonder bread, which Paul had to drive two towns over to find. Lizzie remembers the terror she felt then—the shock at how fragile her mother could be, taken down by just one bite of a spoiled mollusk. “All you need is a little fresh mascara,” Lizzie says hopefully.

  “Don’t lie,” says Janice. “I look ghastly.” But she pushes herself upright again anyway, clutching her robe with one hand so that it doesn’t gape open. Instead of stopping when she’s vertical, though, she continues in a 180-degree arc until her forehead is touching her knees. She gulps at the air.

  “Oh God,” Janice says. “I think I might throw up.” She lurches out of bed, stumbling over the hem of her robe as she bolts for the bathroom. In a few seconds, Lizzie hears the sound of her mother’s heaving retches. By the time Lizzie makes it to the bathroom door, her mother is draped over the toilet, wiping her mouth with a pink square of tissue paper. Little brown flecks of bile spot the white tile.

  Lizzie is flooded with understanding—it’s just the flu. “Oh,” she says. “Do you have the stomach flu or something?”